Last Chants for a Slow Dance

Jon Jost's first narrative feature is a psychological portrait of a jobless drifter named Tom (Tom Blair), wandering across Montana on a halfhearted search for work. A brief visit to his family early on in the film sketches in the details of his troubled marriage, and suggests that his travels are really nothing more than a self-justifying flight from responsibility. As his journey goes on, it becomes apparent that he's more interested in shooting the breeze with strangers in coffee shops and picking up women in bars than he is in actually finding a job to support his family. Tom's mixture of charm and obnoxiousness hints that he may be something other than a run-of-the-mill absentee husband, and the film's final moments provide shocking confirmation.